I've been a Plantronics fan for sometime and the below is an excellent (extremely thorough) review of the Voyager Pro UC product. It is Optimized for Office Communicator and I understand it works with the 3CX SoftPhone if the PerSono Suite software is installed. (at least it did work with 3CX softphone at one time--if this has changed, let me know). I suggest you read this if you are looking for UC headset.

Jan Boguslawski alerted me to a tight integration between Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office Communication Server. I just got the tip so take a look. If you have any more information your welcome to comment!

My first impression is very good. Easy to setup. Easy to use. Very very affordable, solid workhorse phone. THE answer to CEO's that don't want a "stupid software phone" but want benefits of OCS for their company.

Some things I didn't note on the video:-OCS presence changes to "In Call" on a call.-You can register to OCS and several SIP IP PBX's at the same time-If you have the phone registered to OCS and SIP and make a call on SIP PBX it will put your OCS presence to "In Call"! Wow!

I decided to throw up a simple survey to see what SIP handsets Windows phone system resellers are using. A few days later I noticed that the 3CX Facebook group also had a similar survey going! What a coincidence! The windowspbx.blogspot survey has ended and the facebook survey seems to have collected the majority of votes coming. So here is the data!

There are some slight differences in the survey framing: windowspbx had no "other" category, 3cx had no "aastra" category and 3cx put Linksys and Cisco together (smarter I believe) but the results are still interesting. Some notes on reading the chart: Blue is WindowsPBX Blog results, Red is 3CX results and Green is the combined results.

It appears that Linksys/Cisco and snom are running head to head. But there you have it--it appears the Linksys/Cisco and snom are the most popular reseller phones.

Linksys/Cisco has huge market recognition, nice look/feel/design and at the low end some very cost effective phones. snom has good key system features and the OCS Edition firmware is a big value to OCS headed companies.

Note: It is no secret that I am a snom fan--but I didn't vote twice or any other way attempt to affect the voting! ;-)

Forward looking communication professionals have been asking why phone handsets are an “island by themselves” for quite a while. Microsoft has taken a huge step in making your communication system (formerly known as a phone system—but that terminology is getting outdated) an integral part of your business management solution. Visionary professionals in the communication industry say this merging will have transformational possibilities in organizations—and I am seeing this first hand.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 (coming May 2010?) will start the first wave of these transformational communication possibilities. Let’s give some scenarios to highlight the power of this merging of technologies:

What if you were the purchasing person at your company, you are looking at a sales order that has an item on it you need to special order. You have a quick yes or no question for the salesman that made the sales order (but he’s not in the office!)—so you right click on the salesman’s OCS button (right inside GP) and he instantly gets your Instant Message on his mobile device (Windows mobile or nearly any other device) and answers you “Yes, I need that ASAP.”

What if you are the companywide service advisor in your company. A lead tech at another location emails you and says he has a question about service request #10500. You pull up the service request and immediately see the Part he needs to replace has some tricky things about it and you want to SHOW him how to do the repair. You grab the part and directly from Dynamics GP you can start a Hi-Resolution video call with the tech and show him how to do it…(Enterprise video cam=$99 street price)

How about initiate a call to a warehouse phone handset to check on inventory? Initiate a multi-person video conference?

This is just the start of powerful integration of communication and business management software…

Impressive little unit is a complete 20 extension phone system! This is NOT a toy and incredibly well built.

-1Ghz, 512MB RAM, 512MB Hardrive-Full featured phone system: voicemail, email-voicemail, Exchange Integration, Key system features, Music-on-hold and on and on...-very well built unit-rubber feet to set on a shelf or plug to plug into a wall jack-very low power consumption-no fan-2 minute startup time

If you outgrow this unit you can move up to a Windows based server unit.Watch my first impression review.

Pbxnsip now has a version of their Windows phone system that also runs on the Plug Computer. While I’m not a fan of Linux, this product does introduce some very real value to customers. Imagine a small professional office that doesn’t want to have a computer running all the time for a phone system. Or an office that wants zero noise. The unit is incredibly green. ;-)

It administrates exactly like the Windows version and because it is a quite stable platform you really don’t need to delve into linux very much at all. (lot like a Linksys router—although more powerful). When the clients grows they can easily migrate to a more powerful Windows version.

The unit will handle up to 20 users, according to pbxnsip CEO Kevin Moroz. It includes most key system and traditional phone system replacement features right now. It also integrates to Exchange and Office Communication Server.

Video is becoming a larger part of all Windows business communication solutions. OCS has led the way and has some pretty powerful multi-person video conferencing features already. pbxnsip is releasing one click video calls in their version 4.0 product coming up shortly. 3CX has also just announced that they will be adding video call functionality in their free 3CX Softphone.

So IT and resellers will need to find a quality web camera they can recommend. I've been using the Logitech 9000 for some time and have just been alerted to the Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD. In this quick review I will give some of my thoughts--I'm impressed. The MS LifeCam may be the single cam you recommend for SIP video solutions...

Rob Lloyd and myself have been putting a lot time into a new book on 3CX that should be out soon! (in weeks) This book will take you step by step through getting your 3CX phone system up and running and give commentary and real-life tips on Windows phone systems as we go. Think of it as going with Rob and Matt to install 3CX at a client and we are telling horror & success stories, our thoughts on pbx stuff and tips that work for us as we go…

I’ve also enjoyed the give and take on the http://www.3cx.com/forums . A couple thousand posts later (;-)—this book is some of that knowledge written down in an organized way. I’ve even asked some fellow 3CX’ers over there if they would be willing to contribute some of their content and ideas –and they’ve been super gracious. (as always)

Kerry Garrison and I were chatting on the phone about book writing experiences ( His trixbox book http://www.packtpub.com/trixbox/book ) and he said “You don’t expect to get rich on it do you?” I forget my exact answer—I think I laughed out loud—but what my response to this is –Absolutely not! Forum participation, participating in community and giving back in general is not about what you get, but about-- giving back! In fact I am so convinced we must make “giving back” a part of our daily lives that we have a page on our corporate website dedicated to “giving back”! http://www.landiscomputer.com/givingback

Community and giving back is about giving--Thanks what each one of you is giving.

I suggest you head right over to http://www.blogpbxnsip.com/ and subscribe to this blog for the next 40 days if you are a Windows communication pro. I’ve worked with many software based phone systems and this one has the most impressive feature set of any I’ve seen. The product is also very stable—1 Windows service and 16MB of code! (53MB RAM running 15 extensions!) The one gotcha is ease of use, (3CX has that nailed!) but once you have it under your belt you are ready to replace all those traditional phone systems/key systems people are throwing out!

They have a lot of interesting innovation: Integrates to OCS, a mile long list of features, very good mobile phone integration, key system feature replication, it runs on Windows as well as a small 4 PSTN appliance the size of a Linksys router, they’ve just released a plugComputer version that can run an office with 15 extensions!

Startready.com is advertising an appliance that is a complete Microsoft Office Communication Server implementation in one box. I haven't used one of these appliances but it appears they may have several virtual machines running on this unit.

After reading several articles about the future of office communications and doing some thinking I am becoming more and more of the opinion that future phone system/UC end point will be PC based. Perhaps not your current PC but more of a PC than a current traditional handset. Perhaps something like a separate netbook form factor unit with a quality handset? Why do I think that?

-Naturally Moving that Way - Take some of the modern SIP handsets out there already: like the Grandstream GVX3140 video phone and maybe the Snom 870. What is common about these? They are taking on the features of a PC: The Grandstream has a built in webcam, small color screen and the ability to plug in a mouse. The snom 870 has a big color touch screen. But in each case, if you are doing heavy UC stuff the user is left feeling like: give me a full keyboard to look up things in the directory with a little speed…or give me a bigger screen so I can realistically see my video conference…

-Affordability – With the low cost of Netbooks, do $1500 handsets for UC make sense?

-Usability – The user being able to discover features. Microsoft OCS is making incredible strides in making features understandable to the masses. How many people can make a 10 person conference call at your company? Maybe the the telecom guy and the goto-geek guy. With OCS (for example) you can just drag the people you want into a conference using you mouse. It’s instantly intuitive. Basically Zero learning curve.

-Flexibility – A netbook based endpoint could do SIP, OCS, or whatever using currently available software today.

-Video Conferencing – Nice big screen (compared to desk phone) and plug in an even bigger one with the external VGA plug if you want.

In answer to “the CEO Will Want a phone handset” you can give him a CX200? (or the newer CX300)? In answer to the “what if my pc reboots?” question—hey, you have a separate netbook that won’t be rebooting!

Maybe the USB handset combined with The Phone Netbook is the wave of the future? And not just a cheap way to get things done? Maybe the Polycom CX200 isn’t so weird?

I'm getting very hooked on video conferencing. When it is one-click to setup a call and the video is so smooth and life-like-wow. I've been checking out various webcams that work nice for Office Communicator. Currently I'm using a Logitech WebCam Pro 9000 for Business. I have zero issue with the Logitech--it's excellent. I'm just wondering-- is this Microsoft LifeCam Cinema even better? If you have any experience I'd be glad to here it as a comment here. Thanks.

ps--After reading some impressive Amazon.com reviews of this product, I've laid out a couple gift-certs I recieved for Christmas and have one of these heading my direction. Expect a video review sometime soon. ;-)

If you see dubious looking ads that tout "3-c-x on Linux" you can safely be assured they are fake, says test and support engineer at 3CX. 3CX makes the 3CX Phone System for Windows as a replacement for various Asterisk renditions Windows savvy people used when they didn't have a Windows based phone system option.

Now there are multiple systems that run on Windows including 3CX, ObjectWorld/Addtran, Microsoft Office Communication Server, and pbxnsip. pbxnsip is unique in that it runs well on both Windows and Linux.

We've been long time fans of ThinkPad laptops and it's interesting to see they are the only Microsoft Office Communicator Optimized laptop available. The Thinkpad T400 and T500 models have earned this designation.

Leonidas Georgiou over at 3CX noted some features expected in 3CX version 9. If you are a 3CX client don't worry: 3CX is still moving at a dizzying pace and there will be plenty of features for your maintenance fees!

Jan Boguslawski, over at http://ocsphoneguy.blogspot.com/, draws our attention to an incredible FREE OCS to SIP Phone integration. This integration allows you to connect Office Communicator to a SIP phone to make PBX calls directly from Communicator! While this integration is with snom phones something like this could be done with other standard SIP phones also.

I was a bit surprised by the "What PBX Do You Use" Survey. I expected 3CX to come away by far the highest for several reasons: Active community, free edition and high amount of resellers and DIY'ers. pbxnsip hung in there and apparently the deadline squeaked some votes in at the last minute. Considering the 3 Asterisk and 3 Traditonal pbx votes, some people haven't been convinced to move to a Windows PBX yet! ;-)

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About Me

Matthew M. Landis has various industry certifications: Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Microsoft Certified Database Administrator, Microsoft Office Certified Expert, Microsoft Certified Dynamics, Network+ and A+.
In 1995 Matt started Landis Computer which has been providing IT services to small businesses for 14 years and is now a 11 person Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Matt has over 14 years of field experience implementing Windows Server, Microsoft & Dynamics ERP solutions in small business environments.
Matt is very active in the Windows based IP PBX community: He was a 3CX Valued Professional from 2008-2010 and has co-authored a book on Windows communication software "3CX IP PBX Tutorial". He is pbxnsip Certified, he has contributed thousands of posts to the 3CX community forum and he writes the monthly Windows PBX Report e-newsletter for VARS and administrators. His company, Landis Computer, was the first company in the USA to be designated a 3CX Premium Partner.
When not working and when a chance affords Matt likes to travel internationally with his wife Rosalyn and is very involved in his church.